At the same time, these efforts to divide America from England only further the merging of American culture with Jewish culture. The residents of New Afflatus await the day when America will be "thoroughly oxygenated" and no longer require "permanent dwellings," at which time "the citizens of the United States will resume the salutary wandering life of the ancient Hebrews" (27.6). Their Jewish writing system has already begun to collapse American identity into Jewish identity, for, as shown on the blackboard in this central panel [fig. 6; 28.3], the English word "vow" looks identical to the Yiddish word for "where" (in traditional Yiddish orthography), while the English word "air," as rendered on this display case, is spelled exactly like its Yiddish homophone, the pronoun meaning "he" (cf. German er). Of course, one needn't look to the Hebrew alphabet to find such slippage between orthographies: French pain and English "pain" also share the same spelling. Such overlapped spellings show that speakers of different languages may find false meanings when their languages share an alphabet: unintended associations can lead to confused interpretations. But worse problems may result when the transliteration of one language into another's alphabet obscures linguistic meaning altogether.  continue...